The "recession" affair
- Note: JPxG, the author of this article, participated heavily in this discussion, and got quoted in Fortune about it. I tried to do the responsible thing and get someone else to write this, but I failed, so instead I'm writing a political op-ed about a RfC that I opened and then participated in. Read at your own (and my own) risk.
Y'all heard about politics?
Before you start: yes, this is an American Politics 2 thing. If you want to just unplug your monitor right now, this is probably better for your mental health. Go ahead, I don't blame you. You might want a claw hammer to make sure.
...
You're still here? Okay, well, abandon all hope ye who enter here.
Here is the deal: a few days ago, the United States Commerce Department reported that gross domestic product had gone down for two quarters in a row (a criterion often said to indicate when an economy is "in a recession"). U.S. President Joe Biden, along with other administration officials, said that the current situation is not typical of a recession, and that official determinations of US recessions are made by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The NBER is some big-brain organization which conducts comprehensive evaluations of "economic activity spread across the market, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales", and uses these factors to determine start and end dates for US recessions. Pretty straightforward.[1]
Okay, some politicians said some stuff: who cares? Well, it turns out, Wikipedia has an article about recessions (oh no). It turns out that this article provides some definitions of recessions (oh no). If you have ever heard of Wikipedia, it is easy to predict what happened next: some people edited the article. If you have ever heard of Twitter, it is easy to predict what happened after that: all hell broke loose.
So a few people on Twitter posted screenshots of the article's revision history, implying that it was being modified to advance a political agenda. This claim was immediately picked up by a number of publications, some more reliable than others.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] Some of them reported on the controversy, and many of them just reprinted the tweets without checking. For the record, the articles in the Washington Examiner, Fortune, and NPR were pretty good. But most of them figured that the big story here was that Wikipedia had officially altered the definition of a recession, and that we had permanently locked the page to any subsequent edits, and we were falling in lockstep with the Biden administration's attempts to do the same, and it was yet another entry in a long list of the woke far-left Wikipedia libs censoring reality to suit their agenda, and this country is going down the tubes, and kids these days are on their phones too much, and I went to CVS and I can't find the damn antacid pills, and the sky is falling and we're all going to die.
A bunch of people got really mad about this, and approximately a bajillion of them showed up on the talk page to tell us about it, and Elon Musk @'d Jimbo Wales about it, and...
But, okay, hold on a minute, what? Is that actually true? I mean, the part about Wikipedia officially altering the definition of a recession and locking the page to all further changes, not the part about CVS deciding to put the Rolaids somewhere stupid, which is obviously true. Did any of that Wikipedia stuff really happen? Did we really pull a MINITRUE? The answer may surprise you! Or it may not. Actually, now that I think of it, the answer is extremely unlikely to surprise you.
The answer is "no". As it turns out, the real story is much more boring than this. This didn't stop approximately three million people from showing up to yell at us about it. I wrote a very long FAQ for the talk page, which I am pleased to report has been getting posted on Twitter in response to people getting mad about the news stories. It really warms the cockles of my heart. Anyway, since there is a big ongoing discussion about the content of this article, including a huge RfC on the infamous sentence that I started and then gave an opinion on, I am going to shut my mouth, and show you what's in the FAQ, in the hopes that it proves enlightening:
- ^ Well, apparently it's not "pretty straightforward" for many people, but a full discussion of the issues involved is wildly outside the scope of this article.
- ^ Meads, Tim; Gay, Nathan (July 28, 2022). "Wikipedia's 'Recession' Page Shows 41 Edits In One Week, Attempts At Changing Definition". The Daily Wire.
- ^ Burack, Bobby (July 28, 2022). "Wikipedia Bans Edits to 'Recession' Page". OutKick.
- ^ Hannity Staff (July 28, 2022). "WIKI TWEAKS: 41 Edits Made to Wikipedia's 'Recession' Page in One Week". Hannity.com.
- ^ Daviscourt, Katie (July 28, 2022). "Wikipedia redefines 'recession' to resemble Biden's changes—then locks page to new edits". The Post-Millennial.
- ^ Oliveira, Alex (July 28, 2022). "Wikipedia joins in the gaslighting! Online encyclopedia SUSPENDS edits to its 'recession' page after woke users changed definition to align with Biden's claim that the US isn't in one". Daily Mail.
- ^ Silverio, Nicole (July 28, 2022). "Wikipedia Attempts To Change The Definition Of 'Recession' 41 Times". Daily Caller.
- ^ Bickerton, James (July 29, 2022). "Wikipedia Suspends Editing of Recession Page as Biden Rejects Claims". Newsweek.
- ^ Schemmel, Alec (July 29, 2022). "Wikipedia freezes edits to 'recession' entry after editors try to align with Biden". Idaho News.
- ^ Zilber, Ariel (July 29, 2022). "Elon Musk blasts Wikipedia after it suspends edits of 'recession' page". New York Post.
- ^ Hutton, Christopher (July 29, 2022). "Wikipedia restricts edits to 'recession' page after Biden denial of definition". Washington Examiner.
- ^ Leeman, Zachary (July 29, 2022). "Wikipedia Suspends Editing 'Recession' Page After Users Furiously Debate Definition". Mediaite.
- ^ Mui, Christine (July 29, 2022). "The recession debate is so intense that Wikipedia has blocked new users from editing its recession page because people keep changing the definition". Fortune.
- ^ Delaney, Matt (July 31, 2022). "Wikipedia sees tug of war break out over its definition of 'recession'". The Washington Times.